[mythtv-users] numerous newbie questions

Peter T. Abplanalp pta-myth at psaconsultants.com
Fri May 27 04:05:06 UTC 2005


hi all.  i have been interested in setting up a myth box for
quite some time but as i've seen a number of people do, i
wanted to kick the tires a bit.  that being the case, i went
out and bought a ati tv wonder pro card, put it in my p2 450
mhz box, installed a fresh fedora core 3 and followed
jarod's howto.  well, i got everything pretty much done but
i am having some issues.

at first i set up my card as an mpeg2 card because i thought
it did onboard mpeg2 encoding but that gave me ivtv codec
errors.  i checked the list and found that this could mean i
had a v4l card so i changed my setup and now i get live tv
but it is very jerky and my cpu is maxed.  i think this
means that my cpu is doing the encoding/decoding and can't
keep up.  is that true?  does anyone know if the ati wonder
pro does onboard encoding and if so, how do i get that
working?

so, eventhough i don't have a setup that is working very
well, i've decided to take the plunge.  it looks from my
reading that most people use the pvr-250/350.  i believe the
difference is that with the 250 you need to plug the audio
out of the card into the audio in of the sound card and with
the 350 you don't.  is this true and if so, why?

my next question is about video.  from what i understand,
the video comes in via the cable, into the tv card, from
there it gets processed/buffered and sent out via the
graphics card.  is that accurate?  is the graphics card an
absolute necessity?  do i need to look for a graphics card
with some sort of "normal" video out like s-video or
component video?

actually, can someone please explain how the video and audio
is handled?  specifically, how do things need to be wired to
and from the computer.

finally, the video is pretty awful when viewed on the
screen.  why might that be?

thanks!  sorry for the long post.
-- 
Peter Abplanalp
PGP:     pgp.mit.edu


More information about the mythtv-users mailing list